Dear Parents, Friends and Families

Welcome back to what will be an exciting year full of wonderful opportunities for our children. We hope you had an amazing break and caught up with family and friends. We are looking forward to hearing stories from the children about their adventures.

We look forward to working in partnership with you to ensure your child/ren have a successful year, academically, spiritually and emotionally.

INFORMATION NIGHT

We are looking forward to welcoming as many parents to our information nights. It is a great opportunity for teachers to give you information about the day to day requirements for the smooth running of the classes.

The Information Night is on Tuesday 7th February:

Year 1/2 from 6.00pm - 6.40pm

Year 3/4 from 6.45pm - 7.25pm

Year 5/6 from 7.30pm - 8.10pm

Our Foundation Information night is on Wednesday 8th February starting at 7.00pm.

PARENT HELPERS

If you have a spare hour or two and would like to support your child at school we would love to have you volunteer to help in the classrooms. We always need and value our parent helpers at all year levels to help support our children in their learning. Teachers will talk about this more at the information night but if you would like to help out in the classroom please talk to your child’s teacher. There is a Confidentiality Agreement (On Operoo) that you must sign and have a current Working With Children Check prior to helping out in the classroom.

START OF YEAR MASS

It was so lovely to have our Year 1-6 students walk down to St Brigid’s Church to celebrate the Feast of St Brigid’s at our Beginning of School Year and Staff Commissioning Mass. As always we were so proud of our children who were very reverant and respectful throughout the Mass. Thank you to the parents who attended and Fr Andrew for saying the Mass with us. We were so lucky .

WELCOME

We welcome the Dempster family to St Brigid’s. We have Riley in Foundation and Harper in Year 1. We also wanted to extend a big welcome to our new Foundation Families - the El Chaar family (Tahlia), the Newton family (Lachie), the Moses family (Declan) and the O'Kane Family (Annabelle).

We know you will enjoy your time at St Brigid's and the wonderful community we have.

SCHOOL PHOTOS

Date for your Diary - School Photos will be taken on Thursday 23rd of February. Individually named photo forms were sent home to all families on Tuesday. All children will be required to come to school in their correct Summer Uniform (including proper footwear) on school photo day.

TUCKSHOP

Tuckshop will closed tomorrow. Our Tuckshop team are returning on Friday 10th of February. All students will need to bring lunch and snack tomorrow. Orders for Tuckshop are placed through CDFpay and must be ordered by 9:00pm on the Thursday night preceding Tuckshop on the Friday.

OPEROO

Operoo is the platform we use to store information regarding your child and contact details. It is also used to get permission for your child to go on excursions as well as to acknowledge and agree to policies we have in place that both parents and students may need to sign. This communication is our platform where all our information regarding your child is kept. It is important that all your details are up to date and if anything changes it is important to update the information.

You will have noticed this week that we have uploaded quite a few policies and agreements for you (and your child) to read and sign. These policies and procedures are mandatated to be sent out to all families from Melbourne Archidioces Catholic Schools (MACS) as a start of year set up. We apologise that there is a few to read, but once they have been read and signed they are valid for the whole year.

Please acknowledge and sign the following notes:

Digital Devices Acceptable Use Policy 2023 Foundation to Years 6
Parent Code of Conduct
Student Code of Conduct
Mobile Phone Agreement
Parent Helper Confidentiality Agreement

SKOOLBAG

Our Skoolbag App is our primary communication tool between school and our families. It is really important that you have the app set up on your phone and that you allow notifications from Skoolbag so that you are aware of any messages we send through to families. It is also important that you set up your child's year level on the app as we do send messages to specific year levels. We have attached below two articles to ensure that you receive notifications and on how to set up your group for the new school year.

NEW STAFF

I would like to welcome Lauren, Kate, Deb and Moira who are joining our wonderful staff. Please introduce yourself if you see them around the school.

SCHOOL FEES

Our school fee statements for Term 1 will be sent home by the end of next week. Due to the new Governance structures all Catholic schools fees are created through Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic and then sent to us to verify. Fiona is doing the verification process this week and will hopefully have it completed by the end of next week.

UNIFORM

Thank you all, for wearing our uniform correctly and with pride. It was so nice to see our new uniform being worn - it looks amazing.

It was lovely to see our Year 6 students wearing their Year 6 jumpers and tops - they are going to be great leaders for our school this year.

Just a reminder that if your child’s hair is shoulder length it must be worn up.

ANIMALS IN THE SCHOOL GROUNDS

Dogs are not allowed on the school grounds. This is an OH&S requirement.

PLAYGROUND BEFORE AND AFTER SCHOOL

School children and toddlers are not allowed to play on the playground equipment before or after school, due to limited supervision by staff.

Shooting hoops is also not allowed before or after school due to the amount of parents and toddlers that are in the school grounds at the time.

UNIFORM SHOP

Over the past 12 months we have consolidated our uniform suppliers and Primay School Wear (PSW) will now supply all of our Uniform. After discussion with PSW we have made the decision to close our onsite uniform shop at the end of this term. PSW have a shop at 1 Age Street, Cheltenham that is open 6 days a week and families will still be able to order online directly with PSW. We will keep you updated over the next few weeks.

Orders can still be made via CDFpay and will be filled each Monday. The Uniform Shop will also be open this coming Tuesday 7th February between 2:45pm and 3:30pm.

Staffing for 2023

We are looking forward to working together to create a safe and engaging learning environment for all our students. Thank you for all the support you give myself and the staff, we are such a welcoming and vibrant community thanks to the commitment of our parents and staff.

Yours in partnership

Wendy Sullivan

Principal

TEAM KIDS